How do Lexical Factors Condition Speech Perception?

Naturalistic mishearings provide data about lexical retrieval, as they instantiate cases where instead of the intended word, a listener accesses an incorrect -- but often similar word in terms of multiple lexical properties. Here, we examine the relationship between the intended word and the the actually-perceived word for one of the main lexical properties, namely token frequency using two naturalistic corpora of conversational and sung speech and an experimental corpus. Our results suggest that listeners are sensitive to their experience and expectation of their phonetic and lexical knowledge during speech perception.

Kaqchikel (Mayan) has a phonemic contrast between voiceless plosives and `glottalized' plosives (implosives and ejectives) at corresponding places of articulation. Our study investigates acoustic and perceptual similarity within the plosives of Kaqchikel, focusing on how acoustic similarity and lexical factors affect consonant identification.

For my PhD thesis, I was investigating speech misperception in its most naturalistic form, namely slips of the ear. The erroneous patterns in speech perception shed lights on psycholinguistics, speech segmentation, models of diachrony and more. Furthermore, I cross-examined the patterns in naturalistic and laboratory data in English. The naturalistic corpus of 5000 naturally occurring misperception of conversational English yielded as part of the thesis is available at the SEAR Project (www.searproject.org)

How do Lexical Factors Condition Speech Production?

Phonetic studies of geminates do not typically address the question of what motivates the fine-grained linguistically-relevant variation, particularly along the primary acoustic correlate of a singleton-geminate contrast, constriction duration (Kawahara, 2015). In the present study we argue that a major factor contributing to the variation is the measure Functional Load (Hockett, 1955).

How do Lexical Factors Condition Morpho-phonological Patterns?

It has been suggested that the Romance first person singular indicative constitutes a natural class with the present subjunctive paradigm for the purposes of stem selection (Maiden 2005), thus forming a kind of ‘diagonal syncretism’, as the latter shares no morphosyntactic features with the former. The existence of such patterns has been taken to be an argument for autonomous morphology and the existence of unnatural ‘morphomes’, in the sense of Aronoff (1994). Our experimental investigations with native speakers of Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish reveal that this pattern is underlearned. We then study the underlearning of the L-morphome in terms of historical change in the salience of these patterns. Even though many of the morphomic verbs have maintained a very high token frequency (allowing them to survive as memorized), their productivity has diminished over time, and hence they go unlearned as a generalizable pattern. When the distribution of irregular alternations is overshadowed in the lexicon, a morphologically unnatural pattern may cease to maintain its status as part of the grammar.

In this paper, we examine the English phonotactic pattern where consonants following /aw/ are restricted to coronals. The pattern (‘awT’) is pretty regular (more so than velar softening), general (it affects a large swathe of the lexicon), and formally quite simple (more so than the -s pattern). And it is not natural. We report the results of a large scale non-word judgement experiment. We found that to the extent that speakers have any tacit inkling of the pattern at all, it is probably not encapsulated in anything like a phonologist’s rule or constraint. Rather it's based on lexical statistics such as neighbourhood density and phonotactic probability.

Phonetic Bases of Phonotactic Patterns

Laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions are prevalent in Mayan languages. Multiple ejectives are not allowed in a /CVC/ root, unless they are identical. The labial implosive /ɓ/ and glottal stop /ʔ/ are exempt from this restriction. One proposal called phonetic realism (Gallagher, 2010) proposes that it is grounded in considerations of acoustic similarity. This project investigates whether surface phonetic patterning can consistently reflect their phonological classhood as well as proposing an alternative account referring to sub-segmental articulatory structure.

Interdisciplinary work

This study designed and validated a non-word repetition test (UNWR), applicable across 20 languages. It was validated by comparing groups of children identified by their speech and language symptoms as having either stuttering or WFD. This non-word repetition test validates the symptom procedure. Both the symptom procedure and the non-word repetition measure are appropriate for use with children who have diverse language backgrounds.

This study revisited the topic of sound symbolism with a reconstruction approach. A well-known linguistic fact about the linkage between sound and meaning is that the relationship is almost or completely arbitrary (Hinton, Nichols, and Ohala, 2006). By using machine-learning techniques, our results suggested that the connection between sound and meaning is not entirely arbitrary but consistently above random and allegedly sound-symbolic words (such as "clunk", "pop" and "slash") are more reconstructable than just any words.